GERBILLON, JEAN-FRANÇOIS. - Jesuit, missionary, co-founder and superior of the French mission in Peking, b. at Verdun on 4 June 1654, d. at Peking on 27 March 1707. Having arrived in China (1687), he was received at the court of Emperor K'ang-hi, together with Fr. J. Bouvet, among the imperial mathematicians; in 1688 he was sent, as plenipotentiary ambassador, to the Russians to determine the reciprocal boundaries; he made eight journeys into Tartary, sometimes in the Emperor’s retinue, taking advantage of them to study the country, its inhabitants, and their customs and habits. Always highly esteemed by K'ang-hi, who learned geometry from him, he obtained from him an ordinance of freedom for the Catholic religion (1692) and, shortly afterward, having cured him of an illness, an extensive plot of land for the erection of a church and a residence for the fathers, inaugurated on 9 Dec. 1703. Above the entrance to the church were placed three inscriptions composed by the Emperor himself.
Besides many letters, partly unpublished, he left: Éléments de géométrie (Peking 1689) and Géometrie pratique et théorique (there 1690) in Tartar and Chinese; his two principal works are in Chinese: Observations historiques sur la grande Tartarie et Relation de huit voyages dans la grande Tartarie de 1688 à 1699 (published in J. B. du Hale, Description... de l'empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise, IV, Paris 1735, respectively pp. 39-70 and 87-422).